T. Rex Ancestor’s Hip Found in Australia, Proving Life in South

Thursday, 25 March 2010 15:27

A dinosaur bone found in Australia belonged to an ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex, according to a study that provides the first evidence that the fearsome predator’s predecessors lived in Southern continents.

The hip bone, which was found in Dinosaur Cove in Victoria state -- about 220 kilometers (136 miles) southwest of Melbourne -- was that of a tyrannosaur that lived about 110 million years ago, 40 million years before T. rex roamed the earth, researchers said in a Science study today.

The discovery disproves a previous theory that tyrannosaurs never lived in the Southern continents, and raises the question of why larger predators such as T. rex evolved only in the Northern hemisphere, said Roger Benson, a researcher at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. who led the study.